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English
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DB Secret Santa 2025
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Published:
2025-12-15
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574
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1/1
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[Fanart] Water and Fire

Summary:

Secret santa gift for wintersoulwitch featuring Drew Dawson, water (and fire) imagery and a Japanese poem lol

Notes:

merry christmas & a very happy new year to wintersoulwitch and everyone reading this!!!!!!!!!!

materials used for this: watercolours and pencil, it's roughly A4 size (i will yap a bit more about the piece below but thought i'd include that here lol)
i was also inspired by a few Japanese artworks but i can't really fit them here but i will include them in the post i make about it on tumblr!

Work Text:

Watercolour and pencil drawing of Drew Dawson from The Trolley Problem depicted looking sad, one of his hands is half pointing to himself the other is holding a red lighter. His shirt is made up of waves of various shades of blue with golden lines separating them. The background is black with a red sun behind his head. The piece also has a blue outer border and a smaller red border.

I knew I wanted to do something with Drew + water, since in wintersoulwitch's fics, they feature water symbolism heavily when talking about Drew! As well as this, water often features heavily in a lot of Japanese art (& I know they have an interest in Japanese culture) so I figured I'd kill several birds with one pencil shaped stone (isn't nature beautiful!) and combine this all into the one piece!

also, funny story, but I wanted to feature a Japanese poem on this piece so I just googled 'Japanese poems about water' and this was literally the first one to come up pfft... and even though I searched around for a bit longer to see if any others would work, the visuals of this one just worked so so perfectly for drew i knew i had to go with it!

 

A poem called Water written in Japanese by Heiichi Sugiyama.

here is the translated version of the poem 'Water' by Heiichi Sugiyama btw:

I tilt

bucket-shaped water and

toss it out all at once:

for a moment it floats in the air in the shape of a rhombus

smashes against concrete

flattens screaming

extends feelers as if begging for help

struggles a little

then silently expires

 

I did initially plan for the poem to be on the main piece but I couldn't get it to fit well, so went with writing it on the back instead (actually watched a youtube vid about how to write the character for 'water' so it hopefully looks somewhat authentic lol! the poem itself was hard to read in the original Japanese on the only website i could find it on so I HOPE I transcribed it right, but remember I know like nothing about writing in Japanese so there is a possibility I got some of it wrong...

A close up detail of the previous artwork.

Another close up detail of the above artwork, from an angle where you can see the shine in his eyes and on the gold lines.

back to the piece lol so the looming red sun in the background (& the lighter in his hand) are eluding to the canon episode and the simmering rage I know even the au version of him has deep down (& I also just thought the contrasting colours would look nice lol) & the gold lines across his chest is both supposed to look like water or veins, and also, of course, be a reference to the famous Japanese mending practise of Kintsugi (something broken being made beautiful again not despite the flaws but because of them… feels very Drew to me lol)

I was really aiming for a lot of dichotomies with this piece... water vs fire, curved lines vs straight lines, lightness of the drawing of him vs the darkness of the background, etc, since that's often what I feel about The Trolley Problem (both within the au and the canon episode itself)...

these contradictions where you know that Drew is both a victim and a perpetrator, where Blake is both the devil and an angel, depressive vs sadist, where Ellie is once again stuck between them both (adding to this in my work since technically the Drew of the au IS Ellie... he's Ellie and he's Drew... he is his own daughter, he is his own father... I have no idea if this makes ANY sense but I'm going with it lol!)

even the chess imagery (black vs white) which is also reflected in their clothes... all this push and pull that makes the episode SO good!

been a long ass time since I did traditional art and this was a real struggle but hopefully the finished piece is worth it!!